Tuesday

Nov 5, 2019 at 7:05 AMNov 5, 2019 at 7:08 AM

WORCESTER – Patricia Gualinga and her family are among the 1,300 Sarayaku people who live in an indigenous community in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

There is no road access. The community can be reached only by small aircraft or by river. There is no electricity. Most houses have roofs made of leaves. Families fish, raise chickens, hunt for deer and wild pigs, and grow plantains and pineapples to eat. Frogs and large flying ants are also considered tasty when in season.

Despite being from such a remote community, Gualinga has become an internationally recognized environmental and human rights activist. She’s spoken at the United Nations several times, at a climate control conferences in France and Germany, at various American colleges, and last month at a synod of bishops with Pope Francis – all in the name of protecting the Amazon and the human rights of indigenous people.

Gualinga, 50, will speak at Worcester State University at 10 a.m. Tuesday at the Blue Lounge in the Student Center and at 6 p.m. Wednesday at the Eager Auditorium in the Sullivan Academic Building. Both talks are open to the public at no charge. Wednesday’s talk will be geared toward environmental activists.

“What I’m focusing on now in my speeches is to impart to people,” WSU professor Carlos Fontes interpreted Gualinga as saying during an interview Monday at the WSU Office of Multicultural Affairs, “the importance of preserving the Amazon and the importance of the Amazon for a planet as a whole. I also focus on the ways indigenous knowledge can help us deal with the impacts of climate change.”

Gualinga stresses the importance of the Amazon as a vital source of drinking water and as an ecosystem that helps regulate the balance of carbon dioxide and oxygen on the planet, and as a result maintains climate control. Eighty percent of the forests that contribute to climate balance grow in indigenous territories, according to her.

“Nature is a living being that is conscious and a subject that has rights,” she said. “Nature itself has rights.”

Gualinga said people of knowledge in her village were well ahead of scientists in discovering that plants can feel and they have already concluded that ecosystems aren’t merely a collection of plants, animals and rivers, but actual beings that maintain and regenerate the energy of those ecosystems.

“What can indigenous people,” she said, “in the Amazon contribute to a very powerful, industrialized nation? What the indigenous people can contribute is a consciousness about caretaking of our house, of our natural environment, of our planet.”

Fontes, professor of communication and a member of the Global Studies Program Advisory Board, arranged Gualinga’s visit to help celebrate Indigenous Month. Gualinga speaks Quechua, not English, so Fontes will serve as her interpreter this week, as he did for this article. She is looking not for financial support, but to raise awareness. She also spoke at WSU in 2004.

Gualinga and her husband, Dario Jaramillo, have a 9-year-old daughter, Yarapana Gualinga.

In 2012, she helped her community win a court case that found the Ecuadorian government guilty of authorizing oil exploration and militarization of Sarayaku property without permission from the inhabitants. The ruling fined the government $1 million and set a legal precedent that indigenous people must provide consent for governments or private corporations to enter their territory.

Her father asked her to spread the word that it was madness to destroy the Amazon for oil and she also did her best to educate people about the negative effects of climate change. Gualinga blames climate change with more frequent river flooding and plummeting the temperature of her tropical homeland into the 40s at times, causing hardship for her people who don’t have the proper clothing to keep warm.

Amnesty International is among the groups protecting her safety since someone threw rocks at her home and shouted death threats nearly two years ago.

Since her presentation before bishops and cardinals at Georgetown University in March, 110 dioceses have divested from fossil fuels, but 700 across the world have not.

Last April, Gualinga spoke at the United Nations at a panel on indigenous environmental issues that actor Alex Baldwin moderated.

Last month, Gualinga, who is Catholic, was invited to the Vatican by Pope Francis to the Synod of Bishops for the Pan-Amazon region. Her proposal that the Vatican, the Vatican Bank, and the entire Catholic church divest from fossil fuels and extractive industries was included in a document presented to the pope.

Contact Bill Doyle at william.doyle@telegram.com. Follow him on Twitter @BillDoyle15

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